Call centers provide customers with needed information for new products and services, provide responses to customer inquiries regarding purchased goods and services, handle customer complaints and billing inquiries and provide bill payment services to businesses.
In the 1960s, early call centers primarily provided telephone answering services and message forwarding services between a caller, seeking to contact the call center customer (typically a business customer), and the call center business customer wishing to be informed of calls directed to him or her. From that humble beginning, call centers expanded their operations to provide a wider range of services, acting as a customer interface between a customer and a business vendor who sells goods or services to the public at large. However, the prime function of the call center involved the oral communication between the call center agent and the call center customer (as compared to the call center business customer). Even in those early days, call centers would record the agent-customer audio data for the business customer.
Beyond telephone answering services, vendors of goods and services saw an opportunity to use call centers as a mechanism to sell and promote their goods and services. Also vendors saw an opportunity to use call centers to handle customer complaints and provide useful information regarding the goods and services to customers seeking information from those vendors. This service is generally referred to as CRM or customer relationship management services.
The next evolution of call centers involved handling billing complaints from customers and, equally important, services prompting the customers to pay vendors and credit card service providers money owed by the customers (bill collection services).
In its expanded CRM role, call centers evolved from large buildings having large numbers of call center agents with the requisite telecommunication switching networks and phone systems into a more distributed computing environment where the bulk of data processing for incoming calls from customers are handled via the Internet by cloud computing and data storage services. Currently, some call centers have large physical facilities, other centers use distributed computer networks linking multiple agent centers, and other centers have agents which sign into a cloud-based call center processing server (as an example, each agent may interconnect with the cloud-based call center at the agent's home, all that is needed is a laptop computer (or tablet), a telecomm line and an audio speaker-microphone headset for the customer-agent call). Some call centers are independent operators and some businesses have in-house call center operations. Other businesses have small in-house call center operations and use independent call center entities to handle overflow or certain “campaigns”. Examples of a campaign are: new product promotion and sales, product recall events, and credit remediation services due to a business data breach, among others.
Further, to improve the relationship between members of the public who were primarily impacted by call center operations (as compared with the businesses who hire and pay for call center services), the call center industry employs a concept that any person who contact the call center (inbound inquiry) or who is contacted by a call center agent (an outbound event) is a “call center customer.” As used herein, the term “customer” refers to persons who contacts a call center or who are contacted by a call center, in contrast to the term “business” which hires or retains the services of a call center. Of course, businesses may hire a call center to contact other “business customers” but those contacted entities are called “call center customers” herein.
Earlier, call centers provided bill collection services to businesses. This involves collection of credit card, account data and potentially bank account data from customers. Account data is highly sensitive, confidential information. All call center campaigns relating to credit remediation services handle highly sensitive PII data and account data.
Later on, call centers were used to sell goods and services to the public. A typical example of an out-bound event involves a call center reaching out to members of the public to sell credit card affiliate services the credit card holders. Another example of the expanding role of call centers is to obtain information from a customer relating to life insurance products. In this example the member of the public applies for the insurance and makes an inquiry online (via the Internet) or completes a paper form and transmits it to the insurance company. This call center business customer launches a campaign wherein the call center agent will contact the prospective life insurance customer and obtain detailed medical information from the customer. This medical information is highly confidential. Therefore, PCI compliance can be achieved with these features.
The expansion of call center services to its business customers requires that the call center continually train call center agents regarding the information provided to call-center customers. Further in order to efficiently utilize call center agent time, agents are trained to handle a wide variety of consumer interactions both in connection with the sale or pitching of goods and services as well as the handling customer complaints, providing bill payment services and engaging in bill collection services. During the day, an agent may handle 4 or 5 different calls for different businesses. To train agents, call centers record the audio portion of the comm session between the agent and the customer. Managers review the stored audio tracks to quality purposes and to provide additional training for the agents.
To increase the efficiency and utilization of agent time, call centers employ databases or other data storage facilities (as used herein, the term “database” is broadly meant to cover any type of spreadsheet, database, data storage facility and data collection without regard to the type or manner of organization and without regard to whether the data storage facility or function is commonly called “a database”). These call-center databases are operated by call-center processors. Typically, the audio comm session data is stored in the database along with other common data such as agent name, date, customer name, profile, start time and end time of the comm session.
One example of call-center operations in connection with a billing inquiry from a customer, involves the customer calling a unique business-provided number which is tied via a telecomm network to the call center operation. An agent is initially assigned to the communications session (comm session) and the agent opens the comm session with a pre-formatted display screen related to the business. The preformatted display screen is a form stored in the database. The agent asks the customer his or her account number or credit card number. At other times the customer may have accessed the business provided telephone number and the interactive voice response on the phone line requests that the customer input via his or her account number via the telephone keypad or the orally announce the account number or credit card number over the line to the automated answering service. Thereafter, the comm session is opened with the agent and the customer account number is automatically displayed in the database form at a certain data field displayed to the agent. The agent sees the partly-filled database form on his or her computer terminal and more particularly the display monitor on the agent terminal (the terminal may be a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet computer and, in some unique circumstances, a smart phone). Also, the database form presents the agent with questions that he or she will read to the customer. The term “form” is broadly used herein to refer to any preformatted presentation to the agent from the call center processor and the database, including split screen displays showing multiple Q&A form data and data input fields.
The customer oftentimes provides audible information to the agent and the agent either inputs this information via keyboard, keypad or mouse-cursor interactions. In sophisticated call-center operations, the call center will have interactive voice response (IVR) modules which will pre-populate data fields in the database and agent-provided form based upon customer responses to audio prompts. In response to these prefilled data fields, the agent may audibly confirm this information with the customer in order to ensure accuracy. This audio track is recorded as audio data for quality assurance purposes.
In certain CRM situations, a customer may be irate and this customer emotion has an impact on the call center agent's ability to provide assistance to the customer. In other situation, such as the outbound life insurance medical inquiry described above, the agent may request that the customer describe his or her medical conditions in great detail in order to provide sufficient information for the life insurance underwriter. This audio track is recorded for underwriting purposes. The data can be scrubbed for PCI compliance.
In order to improve customer satisfaction, improve the quality of CRM, enhance customer service delivered by call center agents, and to train agents to engage in ever more complex customer interactions, call centers typically record the audio communication during a comm session. Historically, call centers have always recorded audio tracks for their business customers.
Nearly every state has laws that require that the customer must give his or her consent to the audio recording of a telephone call. This portion of the comm session is recorded in the “consent” portion of the audio record and is typically permanently saved with the comm session record file in the call-center database.
However, the long-term storage by the call center of critical audio data such as PII data, medical history, confidential or secret information belonging to the customer is a burden on the center. This is true without regard to whether the center is in-house in a business or an independent operation. Laws and regulations now require multiple levels of security that must be employed by the call-center to ensure that the audio file containing PII, medical data or highly sensitive security information recorded during the comm session is handled with a reasonable degree of data security. Data breaches of databases with PII, medical data and highly sensitive confidential information are a matter of great concern. Governmental agencies actively pursue business that suffer these types of data breaches. Also, as the expense of data storage costs continually fall, businesses tend to keep data files longer, thereby increasing the risk of data breaches.
The burden on the call-center to maintain a high level data security for all audio records of every comm session between every agent and every customer is very high. If all these comm session audio files are delivered to the businesses (and thereafter deleted from the call center database), the business then bears the burden of data security. For this customer sensitive information (e.g., PII, medical, etc.), the comm session data and audio files should be kept in a highly encrypted form for a number of years. Given the fact that an agent may handle hundreds of customer comm sessions a day, secure data storage charges become expensive. Although a call center can reduce data storage charges and processing time charges for secure data storage, the overhead and burden on their data storage resources is significant. Transferring these audio data files to their business customers only passes the buck, the overhead and the burden to the business. The transfer does not solve the problem. Business customers face the same degree of regulations and oversight regarding secure storage of PII data and medical data and other highly secure personal data.
In order to solve the heavy burden imposed on call centers (both in data storage and in processing time costs) and the burden on call center business customers with respect to long-term data storage of the audio files, the present invention provides several automated redaction tools operative on these audio data files. With these automated redaction tools, audio files can be highly compressed by permanently saving only small segments of each comm session audio file. Also, automated redaction tools can trim the audio files such that only a small confirmatory audio segments are saved. For example during a comm session, if the customer audibly announces his or her credit card number as 12345678, the auto redaction trimming tool provided by this invention trims that audio file such that only the last four digits of the customer's credit card account number are permanently saved, that is, the audio file only has segment 5678. The same is true regarding audio recordings of Social Security numbers (SSN). The automatic redaction trimming tool saves just the last four digits of the customer's SSN, that is, 6789 from the SSN 123456789.